


At Your Side

by samchandler1986



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: Babyfic, F/M, Fluff, Prompt Fic, Tooth Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-16 05:31:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16079450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samchandler1986/pseuds/samchandler1986
Summary: Prompt fic: Ruth and Sam are cuddling - because Sam is suuuch a cuddler - and she accidentally finds out Sam is very ticklish





	At Your Side

He lies at her side in the dark, feeling vaguely guilty about stroking his thumb through her mussed curls but doing it anyway. She hums a sigh, less asleep than he thought.

“Want me to stop?”

“No,” she says, voice cracked with tiredness. “It’s nice.”

“Nice…”

“Mm-hm.” She burrows deeper into his arms, sighing. She almost seems _happy_ to be here, making the biggest mistake of her life in a run-down roach motel, in the middle of desert nowhere.

“Huh.”

She opens one blue eye, looking up at him from under his chin. “You have a problem with nice?”

“No, no. Just… not something I’m accused of very often.”

“Well, you hide it well.” Her palm strokes over his ribs, making him twitch. “What?”

“Nothing. Just – ticklish.”

“Really?” Her fingers dance, testing the theory, making him practically writhe.

He catches her hand in his. “Really,” he growls. Aiming for a note of authority, hitting vaguely asthmatic.   

She smiles, almost smug. “Good to know.”

“Mm, is it?” He kisses her self-satisfied little grin instead, determined to have the last word one way or another.

* * *

He lies at her side in the dark, shaking and sweating. The lights outside flicker red, green, red. Stop, go, stop.

I can’t do this, he thinks.  

It would be so _easy_ , to slip out of bed now and out into the neon night. Twenty minutes, tops, between him and a line of blow. Just the one, just to take the edge off. Or the casino bar, even. A glass of bourbon to kill the shakes—

Her fingers curl around his, under the covers. She must feel him trembling, as his body struggles to make sense of this new biochemical normal.

“I’ve been thinking about the season finale,” she says. Tone light, as if he isn’t breaking down by inches beside her.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she continues, “I think we need to go for those pyrotechnics...”

_Step two_. _Find a Power greater than ourselves to restore us to sanity_. He gave up on God a long time ago, but he’s seen Ruth work miracles up close. If he believes in anything anymore, it’s her.

“I think we’ll set the place on fucking fire,” he shivers, squeezing her hand back far too tightly. “But then, what the fuck do I know?”  

* * *

He lies at her side in the dark, breathless and spent.

“Oh,” she says, gasping soft, pressing her sweaty forehead to his. “It’s good to be home.”

“Uh-huh,” he manages. As if her words don’t send an electric trill through his body. _Home_.

His shitty duplex, all he could afford after the clusterfuck of his divorce. Scruffy palm trees waving in the evening breeze outside the window, the glow of the city in the sky down the hill. He’s been viewing it as stop on the road between better things for years, like most of what he’s done with his life since, oh, about 1978.

Now it’s home. _Their_ home. Ruth and Sam, and more-often-than-not Justine.

He should probably get around to doing some fucking decorating, he thinks.

* * *

He lies at her side in the dark, playing with the ring he’s put on her finger.

“I don’t want to sleep,” she whispers, still smiling. “I don’t think I want today to be over.”  

“Me neither,” he admits, surprised to find he means it.

It was a small ceremony. Second weddings generally are, of course, but he’d have done the whole white dress princess thing all over again, if she’d have asked. To his intense relief she wanted small, personal; vows exchanged under the open sky in their back yard.

She kisses him, like she must have done a thousand times before, but some things never get old.

“I love you,” he says, against her mouth. “Wife.”

The word sits strangely, on his tongue and on her. She never thought she’d want this, and he thought he’d never want it again. 

But here they fucking are.

* * *

He lies curled around her liked a question mark, one arm slung over her expanding middle.

And it wasn’t exactly the plan, to be having a kid in his fifties, but if there’s a right time for her to have a baby it’s apparently now; and for reasons he’s never going to understand she’s decided the right baby to have is apparently his.

He took a little persuading. But she’s been changing his mind since the day he met her, and no matter how hair-brained her ideas seem to him at first, they do always seem to work out for the best.  

She moves his hand in the dark, to where the little kicks flutter inside her.

“Fuck,” he breathes, half in awe and half in terror at the mundane miracle unfolding inexorable between them.

* * *

He lies at her side in the dark, listening to their daughter snuffle in her basket. Not crying; not yet; but he knows her noises well enough to tell what’s coming next.

He slips out of bed to pick her up, cradling her against his chest. She looks up at him; his own brown eyes set in a rounded miniature of Ruth’s face. Smiles at him, because she doesn’t know any better yet. He can’t help but smile back. He still thinks babies are boring, if he’s honest; just that this one is an exception.

He’s not at all sure how much of her life he’s going to be around for, when he gets right down to it. And she’ll have Ruth, and Justine, and more Aunties than any child has a right to in the form of the GLOW girls. It’s not that he worries for her after he’s gone, not exactly. But he likes to hold her like this, however soft it makes him, in the hope she’ll at least vaguely remember him if the years of hard living catch up  tomorrow. That she’ll know he really fucking loved her. Loved both of them.

Ruth turns over in her sleep, into the empty space where he normally lies, eyelids fluttering. “Sam?”

“We’re here,” he says, sitting down next to her on the mattress. “Someone couldn’t wait until morning to see you.”

“Oh,” she says blearily, struggling upright from the prison of bed sheets knotted around her legs. “Was it you?”

“Cute,” he says, shaking his head, “but guess again.”   


End file.
